Photographs show damage inside Cern's particle collider

Over the past few weeks, images from the underground tunnel that houses the giant particle accelerator at Cern in Geneva have appeared on scientific blogs, some written by staff at the organisation itself. And striking they are to. You don't need to understand the workings of the machine to grasp the violence of the explosion that put the world's most complex machine out of action just 10 days after it was switched on.The picture appears to show what happens when two neighbouring magnets crash into each other. Cern has made available a full technical report on the incident, which was caused by a short circuit that burned a hole in a vessel containing liquid helium. The resulting explosion caused enough damage to put the machine out of action until at least July next year.For Cern this is clearly a major, not to say expensive, accident. But no one said...

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